Ideally, every community in the U.S. would have multiple air monitors that would sample the air continuously for the thousands of toxic chemicals that we breathe. We don't have such a system. What we do have
is a handful of air monitors scattered around the country, predominately in the most urban areas. We also have an Environmental Protection Agency that collects large quantities of data from thousands of industrial facilities around the countries. The folks at EPA in the
Cumulative Exposure Project have combined the air monitoring data with the facility data and employed a sophisticated modeling program to determine the modeled concentration of each Hazardous Air Pollutant (HAP) for each of the 66,000+ census tracts in the U.S. Their own preliminary tests indicate that these modeled results are very close to those found in our communities in-real-time and that they tend to underestimate true concentrations. We encourage you to visit their website and learn as much as possible about this new data product.

In March 1999, after EPA kept moving up their deadline for the release of the data, I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to obtain the data. EPA had decided not to place the data on their website because industry and air quality boards had complained that it was based on old data and would not reflect the improvements they have made in recent years. They urged EPA not to release it until the model was run with more recent data. EPA is doing this now and have said that they will release the new, more current data at the end of this year. One reason for my desire to obtain this data was to enable me to compare it to the new and improved data and determine whether our air quality is indeed improving as industry and the air quality boards claim.

This will be very interesting. Recently Representative George Miller completed a study of 4 bay area counties using real-time (NOT modeled) data and found that the sum of (only) a handful of cancer-causing chemicals in the air breathed by bay area residents are (remember this is not a model!)
208 times higher than the Clean Air Act goal! Similarly, Representative Henry Waxman found that in Los Angeles County, a
small handful of cancer-causing chemicals were present in the air
of Los Angeles county at a concentration 426 times the Clean Air Act goal.

CEP Data and Mapping for SVTC
Once we completed the Toxic Chemical Source maps for SVTC (below), we asked if they would like me to review the CEP data I'd recently received (as a result of my FOIA request) and apply it to Santa Clara County. We spent approximately 120 hours sorting and comparing the data, producing five (5) CEP maps and twelve (12) accompanying demographic maps - a very preliminary look at the data. We found during this very limited analysis that the modeled CEP concentrations of HAPs associated with cancer risks in Santa Clara County range from a low of under one hundred (100) times the Clean Air Act goal to over one thoudsand, five hundred (1,500) times this goal. There are NO areas in
Santa Clara County that have modeled concentrations even close to the Clean Air Act goal. This, of course, should not be a surprise after seeing the Miller and Waxman reports that are not models, but based
on real-time and very recent data from air monitors.

Our current plans include doing a more comprehensive analysis of
the CEP data for our own county, Santa Cruz. This research will
look at cancer-risk concentrations as well as the chronic and acute
effects of the HAPs.

Creation of SVTC Toxic Chemical Sources Web Map Project
Several months ago we were contacted by Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC) and asked to create a Web Map project that indicated the locations of various toxic chemical sources in Silicon Valley (Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties and portions of Alameda and San Mateo counties). The information, along with the longitude and latitude (for mapping purposes), was obtained from the Landview III data, available free at RTK Net.
We created one thousand, one hundred and thirty-eight (1,138) maps for this project.

Rather than use a true GIS server, similar to the Community Service Map Server we created for
Cruzio, our local internet service provider (ISP), SVTC opted to use image-maps. I have provided a summary of the virtues and limitations
of both image-map based, and true GIS servers below. Note that the majority of the work for these projects is not in creating the maps,
but in gathering the data and preparing it for use. The above SVTC project took approximately 180 hours to complete. Much of this time was devoted to data work. Try it out, you'll like it.

If I can be of any help to you with your data, research or mapping needs, please
send email to meuser@mapcruzin.com.

Thank You,

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